ggieseke, I would like to try your compressed Premiere image. I just bought a Premiere without a hard drive installed, and this seems like the easiest way for me to get it working. I can't PM as I don't have enough posts yet.

What model number is it? The only image I have so far is for a TCD 746320, which should work fine on any 746 series. A few others like jmbach have gotten it to work on a 748 series because it recognizes that it has the wrong (or possibly outdated) software and updates itself, but there still may be some issues there - we're not sure yet.

MFSCOPY on the JMFS tool or Live MFS or WinMFS for that matter will work, any Linux Live CD will do it with dd.

Code:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1024

(In from disk a, out to disk b)

BUT I'll bet you don't have a bad disk. Mine has done the freeze/reboot dance and I'm thinking the disk is OK. After I restarted to TV to clear HDCP confusion, my Premiere has stayed up but I've still gotten signs of impending failure with drops and slowdowns.

One suggestion so far has to been to see how solid the operation is when you keep the Ethernet cable unplugged as much as possible - with the SD menus. The HD menus will complain endlessly about no net access.

Is the blocksize option on the dd command important when you're cloning a disk?

but to go back to your original question, the larger the block size specified the fewer reads and writes will be necessary and that means you'll be done sooner.

As long as you don't set the block size too high.

Well my source drive is in good shape. I did a clone with no parameters of a 1.5 TB disk and it took over 16 hours. The new drive is still questionable to me even though I ran all the tests I could and they all passed. BTW, this was a clone of Windows 7 c: drive. The resulting drive was not bootable and I think I may know why. There is probably a security mechanism related to Windows licensing that encodes something specific about the drive, such as the S/N, so that someone couldn't just clone drives and sell them. I ended up trying dd because the Acronis cloning software which came with the drive (DOM 2009) failed with the error "MFT bitmap corrupted". I ran chkdsk on my c: drive and received no errors, so I'm thinking it has something to do with the fact I'm running Windows 7 and the software Acronis software's date was sometime during Vista and something in the Windows 7 environment broke it. I'll probably call Seagate tomorrow if I can't find a resolution on my own. BTW, dd_rescue and ddrescue; there are 2 different utilities? When I saw someone write dd_rescue, I thought they just made a typo.

Well my source drive is in good shape. I did a clone with no parameters of a 1.5 TB disk and it took over 16 hours. The new drive is still questionable to me even though I ran all the tests I could and they all passed. BTW, this was a clone of Windows 7 c: drive. The resulting drive was not bootable and I think I may know why. There is probably a security mechanism related to Windows licensing that encodes something specific about the drive, such as the S/N, so that someone couldn't just clone drives and sell them. I ended up trying dd because the Acronis cloning software which came with the drive (DOM 2009) failed with the error "MFT bitmap corrupted". I ran chkdsk on my c: drive and received no errors, so I'm thinking it has something to do with the fact I'm running Windows 7 and the software Acronis software's date was sometime during Vista and something in the Windows 7 environment broke it. I'll probably call Seagate tomorrow if I can't find a resolution on my own. BTW, dd_rescue and ddrescue; there are 2 different utilities? When I saw someone write dd_rescue, I thought they just made a typo.

Is/was there a GigaByte brand motherboard involved in any of this?

Did you do the non-bootable cloning inside of Windows?

dd

is a Unix command line utility that actually came from somewhere else, which is why the syntax is different from most of the Unix command line stuff.

It's available on just about any of the bootable Linux environment cd's.

The Linux command line utility

dd_rescue

is on the MFS Live cd, and is much more flexible than

dd

Another Linux command line utility is

ddrescue

which is apparently what the jmfs cd uses for the copy part of what it does.

Thanks. I know this is the wrong thread to be discussing cloning a Windows 7 drive... I appreciate the patience.

Maybe it's got something to do with the whole advanced format and GPT instead of an MBR thing.

Other than that, I got nothin'.

Unless it boots enough to read the S.M.A.R.T. data, including drive model and serial number, and realize that it's not on the same drive on which it was originally installed and balks at that, though I'd expect it to give you some kind of screen saying you had to re-validate the installation or something.

Maybe it's got something to do with the whole advanced format and GPT instead of an MBR thing.

Other than that, I got nothin'.

Unless it boots enough to read the S.M.A.R.T. data, including drive model and serial number, and realize that it's not on the same drive on which it was originally installed and balks at that, though I'd expect it to give you some kind of screen saying you had to re-validate the installation or something.

Okay, now I really got nothin'.

The manual which came with the DiskWizard software indicates that during cloning under Vista, the Vista OS disk will be needed for security purposes. Since Windows 7 is just an upgrade of Vista, I suspect the same thing would be true if I had the right version of DiskWizard. Therefore, merely cloning the disk leaves something out, some piece of security verification that I truly own the Windows 7 which I'm copying. BTW, other than not being bootable, the disk looks identical to the original. dd reported no errors. Also interesting is dd runs silently and there does not seem to be a switch to have it do otherwise, so once I executed the dd command, it just sat there for 16 hours doing its thing with no output to the screen.

The manual which came with the DiskWizard software indicates that during cloning under Vista, the Vista OS disk will be needed for security purposes. Since Windows 7 is just an upgrade of Vista, I suspect the same thing would be true if I had the right version of DiskWizard. Therefore, merely cloning the disk leaves something out, some piece of security verification that I truly own the Windows 7 which I'm copying. BTW, other than not being bootable, the disk looks identical to the original. dd reported no errors. Also interesting is dd runs silently and there does not seem to be a switch to have it do otherwise, so once I executed the dd command, it just sat there for 16 hours doing its thing with no output to the screen.

Whereas

dd_rescue

has a verbose option

-v

which causes it to constantly be putting updated figures on the screen.

ddrescue

probably does as well, but I don't have any experience with it to speak of.

Ok, now I am a little confused. I went to Seagate and downloaded their latest DiskWizard software. I ran the clone option and this time didn't get that bogus error (MFT bitmap corrupted). It went ahead and cloned the disk for me and it is bootable! However, it did NOT ask me for any verification of ownership of the OS. So, either

1) dd should have worked, or
2) DiskWizard is automagically doing something that makes the drive bootable.

What model number is it? The only image I have so far is for a TCD 746320, which should work fine on any 746 series. A few others like jmbach have gotten it to work on a 748 series because it recognizes that it has the wrong (or possibly outdated) software and updates itself, but there still may be some issues there - we're not sure yet.

Thanks for the image! It worked great. I was also able to expand it to a 1tb drive. I wasn't able to copy the image to the disk until I ran the Windows Command Prompt as administrator. I also had to Clear and Delete Everything so that it had the correct Tivo Service Number instead of zeros.

Thanks for the image! It worked great. I was also able to expand it to a 1tb drive. I wasn't able to copy the image to the disk until I ran the Windows Command Prompt as administrator. I also had to Clear and Delete Everything so that it had the correct Tivo Service Number instead of zeros.

Thanks for the image! It worked great. I was also able to expand it to a 1tb drive. I wasn't able to copy the image to the disk until I ran the Windows Command Prompt as administrator. I also had to Clear and Delete Everything so that it had the correct Tivo Service Number instead of zeros.

Glad it worked. That software is basically just the Windows equivalent of dd with a Microsoft dynamically expanding VHD as the target drive. Since the "amost virgin" source drive the image was based on still had huge chunks of space with all zeroes it compressed down fairly well.

Running it as administrator and doing a C&DE afterward is normal.

The next generation is still a work in progress but it's almost there. It can take any Premiere drive (even a 2TB XL4 with months of recordings) down to about 2.7GB, and zipping the resulting image knocks off another 30-40 percent. Once I tweak the "What Not to Backup" code a little further and run a lot more tests it should be ready.

question about upgrade options...bought a new-to-me Premiere that has the original 320 GB drive in it...have to do a "clear and delete" anyways to set it up for us, was thinking to just upgrade it to a 2TB before we start using it as our primary family tivo...so at this point there are NO recordings or settings I need to preserve, could either buy a blank WD20EURS drive and follow the steps in post 1 OR buy a pre-configured drive for around $70extra...

came across DVR-Dude's ebay listings for pre-configured drives, and was wondering if all the "why my image is the best" details were just hype/"buzz words", or if his pre-configured drive really would perform better than what I'd have if I did it myself?

anyone have any metrics? or details on how/why his image differs from what you get by following the steps in this thread? or the preconfigured drives from weaknees or anyone else for that matter?

I have no problem cracking my computer open and doing the upgrade per post 1, as I did the upgrade for my HD Tivo myself, but it does seem to run a tad slower after the upgrade, but if there IS an actual performance improvement with his image, I'd have no problem paying the extra $70 to buy his ready-to-go drive and save my time...

I may end up having to replace the drive, as WD diagnostics found errors, then errored out at the end of fixing them and errored when I tried to do a quick test after that. But all that aside, the image worked, and it's back up and running.

Trying to get the W off my arse... ;-) She uses tivo and has a Tivo Premier Series 4 HD model: TCD746320 with a cable card. Of course right over a year old and just went into Green Screen loop. Have left on over night twice and just keeps rebooting Green Screen. From what I have read this means Drive NG. She's addicted to this thing so now I am hearing about it. I was actually about to upgrade the drive to a 2TB and had already purchased the drive and reading about the process to upgrade when this happened. Hadn't touched the tivo yet when this happened. Since it was already not working I went ahead and pulled the drive and made the iso from this latest rev104.iso booted up with the iso and the old tivo drive that green screen'd and the new 2TB drive. It boots up and says no Tivo drive found. Any way to get a good image to upload to this new drive or a way to pull/fix the old drive to transfer to this new drive? Looking for any advice on where to proceed with this tivo to get it going again. Thanks.

Trying to get the W off my arse... ;-) She uses tivo and has a Tivo Premier Series 4 HD model: TCD746320 with a cable card. Of course right over a year old and just went into Green Screen loop. Have left on over night twice and just keeps rebooting Green Screen. From what I have read this means Drive NG. She's addicted to this thing so now I am hearing about it. I was actually about to upgrade the drive to a 2TB and had already purchased the drive and reading about the process to upgrade when this happened. Hadn't touched the tivo yet when this happened. Since it was already not working I went ahead and pulled the drive and made the iso from this latest rev104.iso booted up with the iso and the old tivo drive that green screen'd and the new 2TB drive. It boots up and says no Tivo drive found. Any way to get a good image to upload to this new drive or a way to pull/fix the old drive to transfer to this new drive? Looking for any advice on where to proceed with this tivo to get it going again. Thanks.

Unless you have a friend with the same model TiVo you are out of luck as a do-it -yourself project, you will have to purchase a formatted drive off E-Bay or weaknees.